Writer of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror & Comedy

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Scooter Troubles

I own a scooter, a sweet Adly Jet 50. It’s been giving me troubles recently by crapping out at the bottom of a big hill I live near and losing power intermittently. These problems have put me (an my wife) in a few harrowing scenarios involving left turns and oncoming traffic and a puttering scooter.

I thought it had something to do with the clutch. Too much/too little — who knows? I adjusted that little knob relentlessly. Ocassionally, it worked, or gave me the feeling that it worked, since it was really the only thing I knew how to tweak on a scooter to any effect. But that wasn’t the problem. It was the spark plug and spark plug cap.

Here’s how I came to figure it out.

Every time I adjusted the clutch, I also noticed that the spark plug cap was a little askew, and thinking nothing of it, I would set it back in place, giving the larger value for the fix to the clutch. What’s a spark plug cap do anyway, other than just cover the spark plug? Nothing much, as far as I knew. But, in the end, though the clutch had little to nothing to do with the problems, it helped solve them. I got mad while adjusting the clutch to no effect, started the scooter (I thought miraculously), then saw the spark plug cap askew. I stuck my hand right in there to stuff it back in place, and it sent an electric shock up my arm. That’s not supposed to happen, I thought. That’s really not supposed to happen. And thus my thinking turned from the thing I was fiddling with to the actual problem I wasn’t even thinking about yet had been setting right each time. Good ol’ frustration saves the day again.

In regards to the Robin dive bombing my windows, I think I figured it out, or, really, my wife did. She read that robins sometimes attack their reflections in window panes. The robin wasn’t trying to get in, but trying to fight off the relentless robin inside and prevent it from getting out. Since my last post about it, it has been back, but not with the ferocity it previously had. I’ll hear a fluttering pat against a window in another room every once in a while, as if it’s trying to remind me that it’s still there, vigilant as ever.